Revision as of 20:57, 15 December 2015

mIRC is not considered a fast language and, more often than not, the easiest implementation is not the fastest.

The following tips will help to increase the execution speed of a script. Most will have a very marginal speed advantage and, as such, may not be worth the hassle outside of long-running script blocks such as loops.

Custom alias bypassing

When calling any form of command or identifer mIRC attempts to find a scripted version prior to looking for native functionality. This can be bypassed by prefixing commands with ! and by inserting a ~ after the $ of identifers

Conditional Syntax

Best to worst:

if (condition) command
if condition { command }
if (condition) { command }

if-else vs $iif()

$iif() is much slower than using an if-else statement. When $iif() is evaluated it is first rearranged into an if-else statement and the resulting if-else statement is parsed.

Best to worst:

var %result = condition_false_value
if (condition) %result = condition_true_value
 
if (condition) %result = condition_true_value
else %result = condition_false_value
 
%result = $iif(condition, condition_true_value, condition_false_value)

/tokenize & $n vs $gettok()

For successive calls against the same data, it is faster to use /tokenize and $n over $gettok().

[]'s vs $() vs $eval

Best to worst:

[ eval_statement ]
$(eval_statement, 2)
$eval(eval_statement, 2)